neck at all.
“My name is Chief Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov,” the man said. “My colleague is Inspector Timofeyeva.”
Katrina turned her eyes but not her head to a second figure in the room, a young, pretty, blond woman definitely on the solid side. The young woman was wearing an open dark coat and a long red scarf. She could have been mistaken for Katrina’s younger sister.
“We are with the Office of Special Investigation, Petrovka,” the man said. “Can you talk?”
“Yes,” she said dryly. She took another small sip of water. “Will I be able to use my arm again?”
“Yes,” said the young woman. She stepped to the edge of the bed and touched Katrina’s right arm gently. “The wound is not bad. What happened?”
Katrina told her story. The young woman took notes and the man stood, hands in his pockets, listening. When Katrina finished, the man said, “You did not recognize the man you shot?”
“Did I shoot him?” Katrina asked.
“There were two sets of blood drops,” he said. “Yours and someone else’s. Yours went straight to the street. The other person’s went into the park. He apparently got into a car he had there.”
“Are you sure it was a man?” the young woman asked.
Katrina nodded yes and said, “At first I thought it was a big animal.”
“I mean,” said the young woman, “could it have been a woman?”
“No,” said Katrina.
“Could you identify him?” the young woman asked.
“No,” said Katrina. “But you said I shot him?”
“It appears so,” said the man.
“I’m going to show you photographs of the four dead men,” Elena Timofeyeva said. “Can you look at them?”
Katrina closed her eyes and nodded another yes. Elena held up Polaroid head shots of the dead men on the river-bank. Each face was eerily illuminated by the white flash of necessary light. Katrina looked at the four faces. Two of them had their eyes closed. Two had open eyes. One of the two with open eyes looked frightened. The other with open eyes looked angry. All four had dark holes in their foreheads and faces. Three of the men were young, possibly even in their teens or twenties. The defiant man was older, but she couldn’t tell how much older.
“No,” Katrina said. “I’ve never seen them.”
Elena put the photographs away.
“Anything you can tell us about the man who did this?”
Katrina thought and remembered the man coming up from the riverbank, aiming at her and then …
“He walked funny,” she said. “Like an animal.”
“You say he moved quickly,” said Rostnikov.
“Yes, I think so, very quickly. Not like a cripple.”
Elena Timofeyeva glanced at Rostnikov, who continued to look down at the woman lying in the bed. Only six months earlier, Rostnikov, at the urging of his wife and son and his wife’s cousin Leon, who was a doctor, had agreed to allow the removal of his left leg just below the knee. It no longer made medical sense to preserve a gradually decaying leg, subject to infection and providing no support.
It had taken Rostnikov weeks to come to terms with this truth. He had earned the withered leg as a boy soldier fighting the Nazis. He had destroyed a tank. The tank had almost crushed his leg. For almost half a century Rostnikov had lived with the pain from the leg. Because he was a war hero, he had been allowed to become a policeman after the war. He was powerful. He was calm. He possessed the one attribute that made him an ideal member of the police in the cold war period-he had no ambition other than to live with his wife and his son and do his job.
He had moved up the ranks as a street officer and then as a detective in the office of the procurator general of Moscow. When he ran afoul of some of the powerful and displayed a determination that could not be blunted even by political expediency, he was eventually transferred to the supposedly dead-end job of investigator in the Office of Special Investigation, a dumping ground for cases no one wanted.
With an irony that was not lost on some of the more intelligent of the members of the National Police and the KGB, the Office of Special Investigation not only took on dead-end cases but also managed to solve most of them. Rostnikov had gradually brought other investigators from the procurator general’s office. Their moment of initial glory came when Rostnikov’s people thwarted an attempt on the life of Mikhail Gorbachev. They had since managed to walk the line that allowed them to survive the political breakup of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party.
Through all this, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov had been accompanied by his withered left leg. It was not an easy decision to let it go.
Rostnikov’s surgery had been performed in Moscow by an American surgeon obtained through a friend in the FBI who had been assigned to counsel the Russian police on dealing with organized crime. Within days after the surgery Rostnikov had begun learning to walk with a prosthetic leg. Gradually the pain went away. In its place was an occasional soreness where what remained of his leg had to be fitted into the device he now had to endure. He walked with only the slightest of limps, and though he told no one, there were many times when he missed the leg that had given him half a century of torture. He even wondered what had happened to the leg, but he had decided never to ask.
Rostnikov said to Katrina, “The ground was trampled by the first police who arrived, but basically, the prints in the snow were clear.”
A tall, thin woman in white, who Rostnikov guessed was probably from Uzbekistan, came into the room and whispered to Rostnikov. He nodded and looked down at Katrina with a smile.
“Inspector Timofeyeva has a few more questions. Your friend Agda is here.”
As Rostnikov left the hospital room with the nurse, a woman came quickly in. She was a short older woman in a heavy coat. Her dark hair was a wild mess, and she was pink-cheeked from the cold. Rostnikov was already out of the room when the tearful Agda bent over to kiss her friend on the mouth and whisper to her.
Elena stood back waiting. In spite of the difficulty of getting information through the outdated computer network, Rostnikov and Elena had known a number of things about Katrina Ivanova before they talked to her at the hospital. They knew her age, that she had come from Georgia as a child, that she had never used her gun before, that she was a reliable employee of the Ukrainia Hotel, and that she had a long-term relationship with Agda, who played the violin with a band at the Metropole Hotel. Elena stepped farther back to give them some privacy.
Before he had taken five steps into the hospital corridor, Rostnikov found himself facing a man of about forty, slightly shorter than himself and considerably lighter. Through the man’s open jacket it was clear that he was remarkably muscular.
Though it was warm in the hospital, an unusual phenomenon for any Russian building in the winter, the man did not remove his small fur cap. He was clean-shaven and light-skinned, with light brown hair and cheekbones tightened in determined anger.
“What happened?” the man demanded. Rostnikov could not quite place his accent.
“Who are you?” Rostnikov asked.
“I asked a question,” the man said, standing very close to Rostnikov. People passing in the hall tried to ignore the two men, who looked as if they might be about to engage in a monumental brawl.
“As did I,” said Rostnikov. “My name is Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov. And you are?”
“Belinsky, Rabbi Avrum Belinsky.”
“Ah, yes. I wanted to talk to you. Your name was on cards in the wallets of four men murdered tonight. You knew the victims?” Rostnikov handed the rabbi the Polaroid pictures.
“My question first,” said Belinsky. “I’ve seen the bodies. Identified them. I have no need of photographs to remember them.”
The man seemed nothing like what Rostnikov expected in a rabbi.
“Four men were murdered on the Taras Shevchenko Embankment slightly after midnight,” said Rostnikov. “Judging from the names we retrieved from the bodies, the four men were Jewish.”
“With the two last month, that makes six,” Belinsky said. “All from our congregation. We can’t and won’t lose
